


Meeting Sherlock

by alivingfire



Series: Bookshop [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bookstore, BBC Sherlock - Freeform, First Meetings, Gen, M/M, Warning - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-18
Updated: 2013-06-18
Packaged: 2017-12-15 08:47:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/847581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alivingfire/pseuds/alivingfire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson just wants a cup of tea at his favorite bookshop. Instead, he finds some long-legged whirlwind that deduces him from head to toe sitting in his seat and his new friend Molly can't stop st-st-stuttering.  And then Mike Stamford officially introduces them, and John's life is turned upside down. </p>
<p>Slightly AU - Molly owns a bookshop, John's her best customer. Sherlock is... well, Sherlock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Meeting Sherlock

**Author's Note:**

> Beta and britpicking is the work of the wonderful [Ruth](http://theteadragon.tumblr.com/). She kept this American in line and asks the best types of questions. 
> 
> All mistakes are my own, and I'd love to hear if you catch some. Questions, comments, ideas, friendly chats, life-changing advice - all welcome at my [Tumblr](http://yourconductoroflight.tumblr.com/). I'll also let everyone know there when I post the next part, which should come pretty quickly.

     The café was just a short jaunt from John’s flat, and he spent enough of his time there that he should have been embarrassed, but he wasn’t. He just considered himself a regular. A very regular regular.

     It had taken him ages to even notice the place; the blinding neon and pounding music of the more trendy nearby shops easily overpowered the quaint and quiet shop window. Yet there it was, tucked away like a favourite memory to be recalled on a slow rainy day. And, indeed, some of John’s favourite London memories had taken place inside.

     It was not a coffee shop, not really. It’s more a cross between a bookshop and an antique shop that just happened to sell coffee and tea (and some really excellent pies). Large, comfy armchairs in muted solid colors were scattered amongst towering bookshelves and cabinets loaded with oddities that the owner collected and sold. A few chairs were pushed together in groups, but the owner knew her target market well and therefore most of the seats were secluded, intended for people who wanted to spend their alone time hidden in her shelves. John spent countless hours in a large chair that was probably once bright red but had eventually faded into a soft maroon. He finished more books inside that shop than he probably ever had before, filling his empty time with all the reading he hadn’t been able to do throughout his time at university and in the army.

     The place wasn’t actually as dark as it seemed, it just looked that way because of the (obnoxious, in John’s opinion) brightness of neighbouring shops. Instead, the place emanated a cheerful glow that contrasted wonderfully against the flickering fluorescents of the dingy McDonalds next door. The owner didn’t overly decorate – the only identifier that it was even a store was a single cursive name scripted across the front window – except for at Christmas, when she would place a sparkling tree in the window strung with classic white fairy lights.

     It was the tree, John would later realize, that first drew him in. He’d been gone from London at Christmastime for years, content to spend the holiday with the lads in the barracks rather than ask for leave just to watch Harry drink herself into oblivion under the (unfocused and fuzzy) watch of his (equally sober) parents.

     But suddenly, thanks to an unnamed man still probably shooting at his friends far away in the desert (or woman, or kid, who was to know?), he found himself back in London and he was thrown by how different everything was. When he’d left for the army, Christmas was a hectic time, but not anywhere near the madness level he was now experiencing. He was just thinking that maybe he should get himself a nice laptop and jump on that online shopping bandwagon just to get away from all the madness when he had caught sight of a Christmas tree blinking happily in a coffee shop window. He’d stopped, reeling at the first sign of normality and calm, and decided that a nice cuppa would hit the spot perfectly.

     That had been over three months ago. Three hard months of therapy that seemed more useless with each passing day (him, write a blog? Really?), of a shoulder that ached when he accidentally stretched too far or when it rained (so, pretty much every day), of jumping at slammed car doors and barking dogs (people should really control their bloody pets). Three months of that blasted cane that clicked so loudly on the pavement that John hadn’t heard Mike Stamford calling for him until he was all of a sudden in front of him, panting with the effort of catching up to the ex-soldier. John felt his hand tense on the head of his (ridiculous, stupid) cane before he recognized the open smile of one of his old friends.

     “Busy?” Mike asked, and John really wasn’t, he never was anymore, so he followed his friend to a Starbucks for a coffee.

      John chatted with Mike for a half hour, covering all the usual topics (Mike had went and got married a few years ago, two kids, teaching at Bart’s) and John began to dread the impending topic of Afghanistan when a small beep had Mike reaching for his phone.

     “Damn,” he sighed. “Someone needs me to cover their class.” John stayed silent, chewing on his lip. Mike left, but not before pulling a promise out of John that he’d come see him at Bart’s when classes were out that afternoon.

     “Sure, yes,” John had agreed, nodding once. He didn’t necessarily want to see how Bart’s had changed, didn’t really want to talk to Mike anymore either (just in case the war was brought up. Afghanistan as a topic is almost as dry as the place, and nearly as painful), but he figured this would at least give him something to tell Ella at therapy this week. As Mike jogged off to catch a cab, John glanced at his watch and tried to decide what to do until he was expected at Bart’s.

      To the coffee shop, then, he decided. It had been his original destination, anyway. Twenty minutes later, he crossed the threshold and wove his way through chairs and shelves to the back. The owner, a pretty girl with mousy brown hair and wide, kind eyes, smiled when she saw John and walked up to meet him on the other side of the counter.

     “Hallo, John,” she smiled.

     “Hello there Molly,” he replied, grinning back at her. She reached for a mug and a plate from under the counter.

     “What’re you feeling today?” she asked.

     “Tea, if you please. And a couple of biscuits if you’ve got them.”

      “Of course,” she said, and she passed along the order to one of the other girls. She gave him an appraising look and leaned forward conspiratorially. “I have something for you.”

      John stopped in the act of pulling out his wallet to glance up at her expression. She seemed excited, bouncing on her toes, one hand hidden behind her back.

      “Got me something?” he asked. Her happy smile was infectious, so he began grinning back at her without even really meaning to. She nodded and presented a small rectangular box with a slight flourish. He raised an eyebrow, but took it nonetheless. “Molly, did you get me a necklace?”

     She giggled and shook her head. He rattled the package, squinting in his concentration to get this guess right.

     “A puppy?” he finally asked, and she laughed again but threw a napkin at him.

     “Open it!”

     “Fine, fine,” he said, waving her fluttering hands away. He pulled at the ribbon and slowly lifted the lid off the box. Inside, nestled on a pillowed satin liner, was a copper rectangle, carved with an intricate black swirling pattern. Directly in the center, the words “Not all who wander are lost” was stamped in typewriter script. John laughed when he realized what it was.  
“Molly, dear, did you get me a Tolkien bookmark?”

     She nodded emphatically, and clapped her hands in excitement.

     “You told me that the first book you finished here at the shop was _The Hobbit_ ,” she explained. “And you’ve read it again since then so I thought-“

     “I love it, Molls. Thank you,” he said, cutting her off. “What do I owe you for it?” He pulled the bookmark out to inspect it more carefully before setting it aside and reaching for his wallet again.

     “Oh, hush, put that away,” she said, waving away his offered cash. “You’re one of my best customers. Plus, I got it cheap,” she laughed. He joined in, accepted his mug of tea, thanked Molly again, and headed to his usual chair, pausing to grab a newspaper on the way.

     He stopped short when he realised that it was occupied.

     It shouldn’t have been a shock. Of course Molly had other customers, and just because the regulars knew that was John’s chair didn’t mean that every other person who walked in would know the same. John realized with a start after a few seconds (in which the man didn’t seem to notice him at all) how ridiculous he must look staring at the stranger sitting in his seat and made himself move to the closest adjacent one, a large grey leather chair (that wasn’t nearly as comfy as his usual, he thought bitterly). Despite his obstacle, he settled in and took a sip of his tea before rustling open his newspaper.

     But it was hard to concentrate. The stranger had his hands pressed together under his chin as if in prayer and was staring in a slightly unfocused way at John’s cane, which he’d propped up on the small table beside his chair. When John noticed this, he shifted uncomfortably but tried (rather unsuccessfully) to ignore it. A few tense minutes passed (and John realized he’d read the same line six times and still hadn’t absorbed it) before Molly appeared around the corner with a plate.

  
     “John, you forgot your biscuits,” she said, and she was too busy arranging the sweets on the saucer to notice that the occupant of the chair was not her intended target. A few things happened in quick succession; a high-pitched shriek, a smash of pottery, and John leapt to his feet, reaching for his assault rifle. It took a full five seconds and several more grasps for a gun that wasn’t there before he remembered that he wasn’t in Afghanistan being shot at – he was perfectly safe in a café in London and Molly and the stranger were both staring at him.

     “Uh, um, sorry,” John stammered, and dropped to a crouch to begin picking up pieces of the broken plate and the crumbs that used to be his biscuits. He felt his face warming and his hand clenching under the stares.

     “Ah, Molly,” said an unbearably deep voice (which sounded as if nothing odd had just happened; like an ex-soldier hadn’t just had the strongest flashback in his life right in front of his weird pale eyes), and John could only assume that was the chair-stealing stranger, but he wouldn’t risk the glance up to check. “Good, you’re here. Why are you here? Never mind, doesn’t matter. I believe they serve coffee here, and I’ve a desperate need. Black, two sugars.”

     “Wh- uh, sure. Okay. Coffee, right,” Molly said, sounding dazed, and John watched her shoes disappear around the corner just as quickly as she’d appeared. He had successfully collected the biscuit fragments and plate shards into a pile, and didn’t really know what else he could do from his position on the floor, so he decided to clamber back into his chair and face the stare he still felt from the deep-voiced stranger.

     He was pushing up from the floor when the blinding pain shot up his leg and he was left frozen in a horrible half-crouch. Sudden awful panic coursed through his body. _Why, why, why here?_ bounced desperately through his mind, and he refused to make a noise even as his left hand shook so hard that it rapped the floor several times. Sweat quickly began to bead on his forehead, but he couldn’t risk wiping it off.

     He was considering a roll onto his side just to make his leg stop its excruciating throbbing, but before he could take the plan to step two he was being hoisted up in one swift movement by two large hands gripping his arms. His vision turned spotty as he swayed and tried to collect his balance. A gentle shove to the middle of his chest pushed him back into the safety of his chair.

     “Thank you,” John rasped, or at least he tried to, but all that he could hear come out of his throat was an odd scratching noise. He heard a reply, a deep voice rumbling next to him, but he couldn’t quite put meaning to it. He looked up, and all he could register through the fog lingering in his brain was a flash of silver. John’s addled brain decided after a few long seconds that the pop of unnatural colour must have been the stranger’s eyes (which were two of the only things he’d noticed while the man stared his cane down like it had personally offended his mother, the Queen, and the man himself). The fog was getting worse, and he should have been panicking again, but then the silver-blue eyes rolled once and he felt a hard pressure on his nose ( _like going underwater when I first learned to swim_ , John mused slowly, his voice echoing weirdly in his almost empty brain). He gasped, and the world went sharp again.

     “…lack of oxygen is causing the diffused cerebral hypoxia, but he’s breathing again normally so he’ll be fine.”

     John did not look away from the silver eyes coming into focus before him, afraid that if he so much as glanced away it would all go fuzzy again. (Ridiculous, he knew that. He _did_ go to medical school; he understood the effects of oxygen deprivation just fine. But it was nice to have an anchor to hold him to Earth for a few more seconds just in case.) Molly’s scared squeak was suddenly making its way to his consciousness as well.

     “John. John? Can you hear me?” John wrenched his eyes from his quicksilver saviour and turned to look at her scared expression.

     “I’m fine, Molly.” John cleared his throat, which in turn made him feel like he’d just swallowed a knife set. He coughed, self-conscious, and grabbed for his cooling tea. “Just a bit of a scare, you know. My leg –“

     “Your limp is psychosomatic,” a deep voice cut him off.

     John turned again, feeling like a battered tennis ball being knocked from one side of a court to another. Poor Molly looked as if she was about to faint, but no one else had ever questioned the sincerity of his limp before. He made a quick decision after a strengthening gulp of tea, and turned back to the distressed woman.

     “Molly, really. I’m fine. I could do with some more biscuits, just to make sure my blood sugar is okay. But I’m fine. _Really_.” And he put all the emphasis he could into his really, letting her know that he just needed a moment. She nodded, still wide-eyed, but turned to leave for the second time.

     “Your limp is psychosomatic, or at least partially. There’s no reason it should have stopped you from standing,” the man repeated as soon as Molly disappeared. John felt the blood rush to his face as his embarrassment caused his temper to rear its unwelcome head. The leg was humiliating enough without a perfectly healthy man (a perfectly healthy ponce, from the looks of him. Cheekbones like razors, hair like a black lion’s mane, and tighter trousers than any man had a right to wear) telling him that it shouldn’t be causing him problems. (Once again, med school. He was well aware there was no actual wound on his leg. That didn’t make it hurt any less.)

     “I know it’s psychosomatic,” John croaked, throat still irritated from his brief stint without air, “my th-“

     “Your therapist told you, yes. You’ve been seeing her for a while, two months? No, three; ever since you were invalided back to London with a barely-healed wound that you received in Afghanistan.”

     John just gaped. This man, this person that he’d never even met before, was rattling off his life story like it was written on his face. Before he had a chance to reply, Molly appeared at his shoulder with a coffee. The stranger, whose narrowed (grey? Green? Blue?) eyes had been flickering over John’s face like it held the secrets of the universe, noticed her and a thin smile slid onto his face. John couldn’t be sure (as he’d just met this person) but the smile seemed fixed, as if it took effort to put it there.

     “Thank you, Molly.”

     “Y-You’re welcome. What are you doing here?” Molly asked. John was amazed; he’d never heard her sound quite so small.

     “Needed coffee, and a place to think. Also, I believe I’ve just been forcibly removed from my flat. Small chemical fire, nothing serious.” The man waved his hand as if attempting to beat the obvious follow-up questions away from him. He finally pulled his narrowed-eye gaze off of John and slid it onto her. “What are _you_ doing here?”

     “Th-this is m-my shop. I own this place.” And John saw a bit of the Molly he knew under that little timid lamb exterior – a hint of pride showed through as just a tiny twinkle in her eye. But the man gave her a look as if she’d said she had taken up carjacking, all frowning lips and contorted eyebrows, and that sparkle disappeared.

     “Your shop? You have a job. Why do you need a shop?” The words were tossed like tacks, sharp and quick and obviously painful for Molly. John felt his anger growing again as he watched the uncertainty cross her face.

     “Be-because I like having people to talk to,” she started, and caught the look on his face and raised a quick hand. “ _Living_ people. The dead aren’t usually very talkative.”

     “Oh, I get it,” John interrupted, voice blessedly back to normal. “I passed out.” Molly and the man both turned to look at him, very clearly confused. “That’s what happened, right? I must have fainted, because the sweet coffee shop girl I’ve known for three months apparently talks to dead people and some stranger I’ve never met knows all the details of my life.”

     Molly flushed and stammered a couple of syllables that weren’t English, but the man just stared, and John felt pinned under his sharp gaze. (But John also noticed that one side of his mouth was slightly upturned in the barest hint of a smirk – as if he wanted to smile at John’s barely veiled sarcasm but wasn’t sure if he could, or should. And if that made John want to be sarcastic a little bit more often, well, that’s no one’s business but his own.)

     “I-I don’t actually talk to, to dead people,” Molly stuttered, her face crimson. “I’m a pathology lab assistant at a morgue.”

     “Which is where you should be,” the man scoffed. “Who am I supposed to get bodies from now?”

     John just raised his eyebrows, still (slightly) not convinced that his fainting theory was wrong. A (possibly mad) man was talking about pilfering dead bodies from a morgue in a perfectly carrying voice in the middle of a café to a woman who, up until two minutes ago, John had considered a well-balanced, rather kind girl but who apparently assists the (definitely mad) man with his aforementioned pilfering.

     “I still work there. I just couldn’t be there all the time,” Molly said. “I had some money saved up, Bart’s pays really well, but… It’s-it’s a lonely job, and –“

     But she was cut off by the ringing of a phone. One swift movement later, the man had a phone pressed to his ear and he was rattling off an impossibly fast, nearly unintelligible string of words.

     “Lestrade. I’ve almost got that murder suicide solved, but I need into the lab. The sample of soil under the man’s fingertips will tell us if it was the brother or the mother.” He stopped for a moment, and then rolled his eyes spectacularly. “No, of course it wasn’t actually a suicide. The details are clearly- no, forget it. Too much to explain over the phone. Meet me at the lab in twenty. And bring the samples, but don’t let Anderson come.” And he ended the call, turned with a (exuberant and unnecessary) swirl of his coat, and strutted to the door. He stopped in the doorway and turned back to the two stunned faces he left in his wake.

     “Molly. Coming?” he asked imperiously.

     “I, uh,” Molly glanced at John, “I’ll be right there.” The man nodded, and stepped outside. She turned to give John an apologetic look. “Sorry, John. I’ll try to explain it all later. But I-I should go. Sorry.” And she dashed out the door to follow that (mad) man.

     John just shook his head, feeling like he’d just been hit by a rude hurricane with ridiculous curly hair. He sighed, picked his crumpled newspaper off the ground, and tried to resume his reading, but his concentration was shot.

 

  

     An hour later, John felt like a real hurricane would be a welcome relief from Mike’s never-ending tour and constant overly cheerful questioning. Not enough had changed at Bart’s in the fifteen years since John had been there to keep this tour going as long as it had been. (A few more computers, a couple of remodeled labs, some repainted doors. He could honestly not care any less.) Add that to John’s aching knee, twitchy left hand, and rumbling stomach (he never had managed to get those biscuits from Molly) and he felt like the smallest push would send his touchy temper into a fit.

     But Mike, who was checking the windows before entering each room to make sure it was unoccupied, suddenly turned and gave John a conspiratory wink and lowered his voice to a whisper.

     “This’ll be worth seeing, mate. Kind of a local legend, of sorts.” He raised his voice back to a slightly-louder-than-normal pitch and pushed open the door, announcing their arrival into “the most well-equipped lab in London”. John gave the place one good glance over and was quite ready to leave when a (so deep, impossibly deep, and already impossibly familiar) voice stopped him in his retreat back out the door.

     “Mike, can I borrow your phone?”

     And Mike, instead of answering, sent John a look that said _yeah, this is that local legend I was talking about and yeah we’re on a first name basis_ so clearly that a blind person could have picked up his meaning. The stranger (though not really a stranger anymore, John thought) looked up from his microscope at the brief silence and regarded John with a half smirk.

     “Well, we meet again John. Nice to see your leg is still functioning somewhat after your scare earlier.” And John felt his mouth pop open, amazed. No normal human brings up things like psychological problems and almost panic attacks in front of other people, if at all, but this man rattled it off as if it wasn’t the highlight of John’s humiliating moments reel.

     “Uh, yes. Hello, again,” John said, because even though he wanted to be angry at the man he also was very, very British, and didn’t want to cause a disturbance with an audience.

     “Oh, you’ve met?” Mike asked, looking between the two of them and either solidly ignoring the rising tension (because the stranger wasn’t looking away so, of course, neither was John) or just happily unaware. But before either man broke and answered him, a phone rang and broke the silence.

     John saw Mike pull his mobile from his pocket and step outside to take the call, and abruptly found himself rather nervous. The man was still watching, but John finally broke the stare-off to reach into his pocket and pull out his own phone.

     “You needed to borrow one, yes?” John asked, and held it out in offering. He accepted it with a small muttered thanks, typed something rapidly, and handed it back. When John had his phone back in his possession, he steeled himself and asked just one of the questions buzzing around in his head. “How did you know about Afghanistan?”

     The man, who had automatically stuck his eyes back onto the microscope when he gave John’s phone back, did not even bother to look up as he answered.

     “I do not know, I observe.”

     “You observed what?”

     “Tan lines, below the wrist and on your neck, very clearly not from sunbathing and also very clearly accrued over a long period of time, so not on holiday. Your posture, your tan lines, your haircut all clearly say military. Narrows it down to two places, Afghanistan or Iraq. When you sat down and opened your paper earlier, you turned first to international news and read every article that mentioned Afghanistan. After that, you moved to the front page news, then to sports. So, Afghanistan.”

     “So you were watching me? Not just staring at my cane?”

     “Oh, no, I did both. Your cane was clearly not intended for you at first; it’s about three centimetres too short, which is why your leg becomes sore even when you use it. Hospital issue, as well, so you haven’t had it long enough to want to get yourself a new one. Hoping, then, that the limp will vanish before you have to resort to spending a large part of your monthly pension on something that you hate. Which, as I can see you’re about to ask, leads me to the conclusion that your limp was not actually caused by any wound, but instead by something emotionally traumatic. So, psychosomatic.”

     “And my therapist?”

     “You have a psychosomatic limp and you were invalided home from a war; of course you have a therapist.”

     “That was…” And John struggled for the right word, because what could describe this? “Brilliant.”

     For the first time since starting his almost-monologue, the man looked up and met John’s gaze.

     “Really?”

     “Yes, of course. It was brilliant, absolutely amazing.”

     The man seemed like he didn’t know what to say, as if his observations usually received scorn rather than amazement. (Which, John realised, was probably true.) But instead of commenting, he fired the conversation off into another direction.

     “How do you feel about the violin?”

 

 

     And John, just barely over twenty-four hours after an extraordinary meeting in the middle of the most ordinary of days, put a bullet into the chest of a man for this stranger, this madman, this Sherlock Holmes.

     (This lunatic who had already cured him of the limp and the hand tremble he’d thought he was saddled with for life. This crazy person who had already brought more excitement and colour into his life than he’d thought possible when he’d been pulled from the war. This rude, loud, aggressive, brilliant, energetic, _fantastic_ man who had mortal enemies and connections with convicts and the most abnormal and mad life that John had ever seen.)

     And now, John had a flatmate.

     (“Of course I know you’re looking for a flatmate.” “But _how_?” “You stopped and looked at the adverts on the notice board when you walked into Molly’s shop earlier.” “That’s fantastic.” “You said that out loud, again, did you know?”)

     And if he was a madman, well, maybe John needed a little more madness in his life.


End file.
